Mobile Alerting: How Cell Phones can save your Employees’ Life

Estimated reading time: 3 minutes

It’s that time of year when the weather gets crazy in the U.S., with flash floods, tornadoes and hurricanes. As an employer it’s your duty to keep your staff out of harms’ way. An easy job when your workforce consists of 20 people, but what if you need to reach thousands of employees simultaneously?

How fast and how well you communicate with your staff during an unexpected emergency can be the difference between life and death. Your margin for error is slim. Seconds count. In the event of an emergency, Netpresenter makes sure everyone is alerted immediately by targeting the devices that are used and viewed most frequently by your staff: their smartphones.

App Alerts

The Netpresenter Employee app transforms mobile phones into personal safety devices. Besides the fact that app usage is completely free, our technology doesn’t require the app to be open on a mobile device in order for a message to be received. This allows a smartphone to receive and display alerts even when the device’s screen is locked and the app is closed. The app alerts are virtually instantaneous once a decision is made to send them, enabling your staff to react right away and make a safe exit. Watch the video below and discover what happens before and after an app alert is triggered.

Text Messaging

With the rise of the mobile app, text messaging may seem passé. Yet, over 80 percent of cell phone users still send and receive text messages. Netpresenter deploys text messages to pick up the slack as emergency communication tools, when the power is off and the internet is down. An awesome advantage of text messaging is that these messages are more likely to get through, as they use less network capacity or can be held in a queue and sent when there is free capacity.

Even the United States government understands the huge role text messaging can play in alerting people quickly and effectively. In 2012 a US law went into effect enabling Wireless Emergency Alerts on cell phones. The system allows authorized government agencies to send messages directly to the towers of the major U.S. carriers, who then transmit those messages to mobile devices. Even a month ago a simple text message saved thousands of lives, when a tornado hit parts of Wrentham (MA). By connecting our Alert Server with the Common Alerting Protocol’s XML-feed, alerts from federal, state and local government agencies can also be received and easily distributed amongst your employees.

Mobile alerting is part of Netpresenter’s alerting solution, also including desktop alerts. Contact one of our experts to make your organization’s alert system watertight. Or download the free infographic about the power of push notifications.